IES Blog

Institute of Education Sciences

The Digital Divide: Differences in Home Internet Access

The expanding use of technology affects the lives of students both inside and outside the classroom. While exposure to learning technology inside schools and classrooms is important, access can also differ once those students are in their homes. It’s important for educators to be aware of the potential barriers to technology and internet access that students may face. A recent report from NCES, Student Access to Digital Learning Resources Outside the Classroom, highlighted some differences in home internet access for students.

The percentage of 5- to 17-year-old students with either no internet access or only dial-up access differed by students’ race/ethnicity.

Access also differed geographically. Remote rural locales had the highest percentage of students with either no internet access or only dial up access at home. Within these remote rural areas, the percentage of students lacking access differed by students’ race/ethnicity. Forty-one percent of Black students and 26 percent of Hispanic students living in remote rural areas had either no internet access or only dial up access at home. This was higher than the percentage of White students (13 percent) and Asian students (11 percent) living in remote rural areas who had either no internet access or only dial up access at home.   

The percentage of students who had no access to the Internet or only dial-up access was higher for students living below the poverty threshold (26 percent) than for students living between 100 and 185 percent of the poverty threshold (15 percent) and at greater than 185 percent of the poverty threshold (4 percent).

In 2015, the two most common main reasons for children ages 3 to 18 to not have home internet access were that it was too expensive or that the family did not believe they needed it/ were not interested in having it (38 percent each). Other main reasons for not having home internet access included that the home lacked a computer or a computer adequate for internet use (8 percent), internet service was not available in the area (5 percent), the Internet could be used somewhere else (3 percent), and privacy and security concerns (i.e., online privacy and cybersecurity and personal safety concerns) (2 percent). 

Browse the full report for more data on additional topics relating to differences in access to technology and the internet.

 

By Lauren Musu

Celebrating the Launch of the Registry of Efficacy and Effectiveness Studies (REES)

The Registry of Efficacy and Effectiveness Studies (REES) is now ready for use! REES is a registry of causal impact studies in education developed with a grant from the National Center for Education Research (NCER). REES will increase transparency, improve the replicability of studies, and provide easy access to information about completed and ongoing studies.

The release of REES aligns with recent IES efforts to promote study registration. In the FY 2019 Requests for Applications (RFAs) for the Education Research and Special Education Research Grants Programs, IES recommended that applicants describe a plan for pre-registering their studies in both the project narrative (as part of the research) as well as the data management plan. IES is also developing the Standards for Excellence in Education Research (SEER) and has identified study registration as an important dimension of high value education research.

We asked the REES team to tell us more about how the registry works.

How can researchers access REES? REES can be accessed through the SREE website at www.sreereg.org. Over the next year, REES will transition to a permanent home at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan, but it will still be accessible through the SREE link.

Screenshot of REESWhat kinds of studies can be registered? REES is a registry of causal impact studies. It accommodates a range of study designs including randomized controlled trials, quasi-experimental designs, regression discontinuity designs, and single case designs.

What information should be included in a study entry? A REES entry includes basic study information and a pre-analysis plan. The checklist of required information for a registry entry provides detailed information for each of the different design options. All of the information for a REES entry should be easily found in a grant application.

How long does it take to register a study? For a study with a complete grant application, completing a REES entry should be straightforward and take approximately one hour.

What if a study entry needs to be changed? Principal investigators (PI) or other authorized research team members should update a REES entry as changes occur. All updates to an entry will be time-stamped. Original entries and updated entries will be publically available.

Are registered studies searchable by the public? Yes! When a PI or authorized research team member is ready to make the study available in the public domain, they click on the publish option. This will time stamp the entry and make it publically available. REES entries that are published are available on the search page. A pdf of individual entries can be downloaded from the search page or an Excel file of multiple entries can be exported.

What will happen to studies that were entered in the pilot phase of REES? A REES entry that was started and/or completed during the pilot phase is a part of the REES database. To make the study publically available and a part of the searchable database, the PI or other authorized research team member needs to click on the publish option for the entry.

Over the next two years, the REES team will be working to ensure the sustainability and visibility of REES with a grant from the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER). To do this, the team will transfer REES to its permanent location on the ICPSR website and disseminate information about REES within the education research community, as well as with funders, publishers, and users of education research, through meetings, conferences, websites, social media, and targeted outreach.

So, what are you waiting for? Go check it out!

If you have questions about REES, please email contact@sreereg.org.

 

 

Recognizing Our Outstanding IES Predoctoral Fellows

Each year, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) recognizes an outstanding fellow from our Predoctoral Interdisciplinary Research Training Programs in the Education Sciences for academic accomplishments and contributions to education research. This year, IES has selected joint recipients for the 2017 award: Rachel Abenavoli and Callie Little. They will receive their awards and present their research at the annual IES Principal Investigators meeting in Washington, D.C. in January 2019.

Dr. Abenavoli received her doctorate in Human Development and Family Studies from Pennsylvania State University (Penn State). She is currently a postdoctoral research scientist at New York University’s Steinhardt’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change, and is working in the area of early learning and social-emotional development.  Dr. Little received her doctorate in Developmental Psychology from Florida State University (FSU). She is currently a research fellow in the School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences at the University of New England in Australia, where she specializes in understanding the development of cognitive and academic skills for individuals from early childhood through college.

We asked our Outstanding Fellows how participating in an IES-funded predoctoral training program helped their development as researchers.

Rachel Abenavoli

The IES-funded predoctoral training program at Penn State provided me with the resources, opportunities, and skills needed to begin building my own program of education research. I began my graduate program with broad interests in young childrenRachel Abenavoli’s social-emotional functioning. The fellowship helped me shape and narrow the focus of my research. By participating in regular seminars, attending talks, and meeting with external invited speakers, I began applying my developmental lens and focus on early social-emotional skills to the study of educational contexts and educationally-relevant outcomes. With generous fellowship funding that gave me the freedom and flexibility to pursue my own research questions, I was able to focus my work in graduate school on the interplay between children’s social-emotional and academic skills as they make the transition to school.

The IES fellowship also provided me with opportunities to learn, practice, and hone my methodological skills. Courses and seminars in program evaluation, causal inference, and multilevel modeling were particularly critical in building my capacity for conducting rigorous school-based research. Invited speakers complemented these core learning experiences by highlighting best practices and innovative approaches in education science. I came away from this training equipped with a range of analytic and methodological tools that are necessary to address the diversity and complexity of education research questions, settings, and designs.

Being an IES fellow has also connected me to a network of established and early career education researchers. Regular meetings with faculty mentors and other IES fellows from different home departments provided a space to discuss new ideas, experiences in the field, and possible collaborations. Conference funding enabled me to attend education research conferences and expand my professional network beyond Penn State. Engaging with this community solidified for me the value of a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to understanding children’s learning and development in context.

My work is more rigorous and more relevant to education practice and policy because of the IES predoctoral fellowship, and I’m so grateful for the experiences, mentors, and other fellows who are critical to the success of the program at Penn State.

Callie Little

First and foremost, the support and training I received through the IES pre-doctoral fellowship at FSU provided me with an intense and philosophical appreciation of construct validity: whether an investigation can accurately measure what it was designeCallie Littled to measure. This appreciation will continue to guide how I develop and implement research studies.

The rigorous statistical courses included in FSU’s core curriculum provided a solid foundation for building my quantitative skills. Additionally, the combined focus on study-design and methodological training supplied me with a comprehensive knowledge base and the skills to investigate the complex associations among reading skills, and between reading skills and behavioral outcomes. The exposure to multiple advanced statistical methods coupled with the opportunity to directly apply these methods to relevant data so early in my career prepared me for my current projects which use large-scale twin data to conduct high-quality research on individual differences in the development of cognitive and academic skills.

The multidisciplinary environment at FSU, with its rich and diverse range of research programs and faculty, exposed me to a series of analytic techniques and content-area expertise that helped to shape an open-minded and creative approach to formulating research questions. This unique environment was one of the greatest advantages to the IES fellowship, providing the opportunity for strong mentorship, collaboration, and feedback. Most importantly, I used this opportunity to develop ongoing projects with colleagues where we innovatively combine evidence-based methods from several fields.

Fellowship funding enabled me to attend conferences and workshops with other IES fellowship teams, and provided me with access to research resources. I gained new insights into science communication, learned new techniques, and broadened my network of collaborators. I was able to recruit participants and purchase standardized assessment materials, and design and implement several of my own studies during my Ph.D. The resulting rich and unique data sets form the foundation of my current independent research.  From my experiences through the IES fellowship at FSU, I stand well-prepared to continue to conduct innovative and high-quality research into the complex mechanisms underlying achievement.

Katina Stapleton is the program officer for the Predoctoral Interdisciplinary Research Training Programs in the Education Sciences.

The WWC Evidence Standards: A Valuable and Accessible Resource for Teaching Validity Assessment of Causal Inferences to Identify What Works

by Herbert Turner, Ph.D., President and Principal Scientist, ANALYTICA, Inc.

 

The WWC Evidence Standards (hereafter, the Standards) provide a detailed description of the criteria used by the WWC to review studies. The standards were first developed in 2002 by leading methodological researchers using initial concepts from the Study Design and Implementation Assessment Device (DIAD), an instrument for assessing the correspondence between the methodological characteristics and implementation of social science research and using this research to draw inferences about causal relationships (Boruch, 1997; Valentine and Cooper, 2008).  During the past 16 years, the Standards have gone through four iterations of improvement, to keep pace with advances in methodological practice, and have been through rigorous peer review. The most recent of these is now codified in the WWC Standards Handbook 4.0 (hereafter, the Handbook).

 

Across the different versions of the Handbook, the methodological characteristics of an internally valid study, designed to causally infer the effect of an intervention on an outcome, have stood the test of time. These characteristics can be summarized as follows: A strong design starts with how the study groups are formed. It continues with use of reliable and valid measures of outcomes, has low attrition if a randomized controlled trial (RCT), shows baseline equivalence (in the analysis sample) if a quasi-experimental design (QED), and has no confounds.

 

These elements are the critical components of any strong research design – and are the cornerstones of all versions of the WWC’s standards. That fact, along with the transparent description of their logical underpinning, is what motivated me to use Standards 4.0 (for Group Designs) as the organizing framework for understanding study validity in a graduate-level Program Evaluation II course I taught at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education.

 

In spring 2017, nine Master and four Doctoral students participated in this semester-long course. The primary goal was to teach students how to organize their thinking and logically derive internal validity criteria using Standards 4.0—augmented with additional readings from the methodological literature. Students used the Standards (along with the supplemental readings) to design, implement, analyze, and report impact evaluations to determine what interventions work, harm, or have no discernible effect (Mosteller and Boruch, 2002). The Standards Handbook 4.0 along with online course modules were excellent resources to augment the lectures and provide Lynch School students with hands on learning.

 

At the end of the course, students were offered the choice to complete the WWC Certification Exam for Group Design or take the instructor’s developed final exam. All thirteen students chose to complete the WWC Certification Exam. Approximately half of the students became certified. Many emailed me personally to express their appreciation for the (1) opportunity to learn a systematic approach to organizing their thinking about assessing the validity of causal inference using data generated by RCTs and QEDs, and (2) developing design skills that can be used in other graduate courses and beyond. The WWC Evidence Standards and related online resources are a valuable, accessible, and free resource that have been rigorously vetted for close to two decades. The Standards have few equals as a resource to help students think systematically, logically, and clearly about designing (and evaluating) a valid research study to make causal inferences about what interventions work in education and related fields.

 

References

Boruch, R. F. (1997). Randomized experiments for planning and evaluation: A practical guide. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Valentine, J.C., & Cooper, H. (2008), A systematic and transparent approach for assessing the methodological quality of intervention effectiveness research: The Study Design and Implementation Assessment Device (Study DIAD). Psychological Methods, 13(2), 130-149.

Mosteller, F., & Boruch, R. F. (2002). Evidence matters: Randomized trials in education research. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

Supporting Military-Connected Students

Through the Systemic Approaches to Educating Highly Mobile Students program, IES supports research to improve the education outcomes of students who face social/behavioral and academic challenges because they frequently move from school to school due to changes in residence and/or unstable living arrangements. This category of students, typically referred to as highly-mobile students, includes students who are homeless, in foster care, from migrant backgrounds, or military-connected. In this guest blog, Timothy Cavell, PhD, University of Arkansas and Renée Spencer, EdD, Boston University discuss their IES-funded research on military-connected students.

Why study military-connected students? Photo of Renée SpencerPhoto of Timothy Cavell

Virtually every school district in the United States educates a child whose parent or guardian is serving in the Armed Forces. Supported by two separate IES awards, our team of researchers is working to understand how schools can better serve military students and their families. Our work focuses specifically on students who have at least one parent/guardian on active (full-time) duty in the U.S. military. We refer to these students as military-connected. Their lives are typified by transition and often entail tremendous sacrifice. For some, the challenges involve a parent deployed into combat or a parent returning from combat. For many others, the challenges are tied to the frequent transitions (e.g., permanent changes of station, temporary duty assignments) required of military families. Our IES-funded research specifically works with military-connected students within the North Thurston Public Schools (NTPS), a school district in Lacey, Washington, about 15 miles southwest of Joint (Army/Air Force) Base Lewis-McChord.

How does your research address the needs of military-connected students?

The Military Student Mentoring (MSM) project which began 4 years ago, is an effort to develop and test the benefits of school-based mentoring for military students. We reasoned that school-based mentoring was a measured response to the needs of students who are often quite resilient but who, at times, might need extra support. A key component of the intervention was developing a mentoring-delivery system anchored by a district-level MSM Coordinator who forged home-school-community (HSC) Action Teams comprised of school staff (e.g., school counselor), military parents, and community leaders. Together, the MSM Coordinator and HSC Action Teams engaged military families, identified military students who might benefit from school-based mentoring, and recruited adult volunteers to serve as mentors. These volunteers were then screened, trained, and supported by a local Big Brothers Big Sisters agency. Preliminary findings from our initial launch and subsequent pilot study support the feasibility and usability of the MSM model and point to expected gains in students’ perceptions of support.  Future steps involve efforts to making MSM more portable and self-sustaining and testing its efficacy more broadly.

Our second project, the Active-Duty Military Families and School Supports (ADMFSS) study, which was funded just this year, explores school supports for highly mobile military students. It is estimated that military students experience 6 to 9 moves during their K-12 years—a mobility rate three times that of non-military children. Most military families and students are resilient and weather these disruptions well, but some are negatively affected by the strain of multiple moves. Growing recognition of these stresses faced by military families has led to calls for schools to offer greater and more targeted support to these students.

We suspect that student mobility is not directly linked to educational outcomes; rather, repeated moves may strain families’ capacity to adjust to new communities and impede students’ ability to connect with yet another learning environment. Therefore, we will be exploring the role that school supports play in fostering military students’ sense of school connectedness. Broadly, the term school connectedness refers to students’ relationship with their school and the extent to which they feel accepted, respected, and supported by others in the school environment. Our basic premise is that high mobility can be harmful to military students’ educational outcomes when it undermines the degree to which they feel connected to school and to students and staff in their school. Supports provided by schools have the potential to buffer military students from the negative effects of high mobility on school connectedness, thereby reducing their risk for poor educational outcomes. Importantly, connectedness is an arena in which schools can take clear and effective action.

Through both of these projects, our ultimate goal is to learn enough to equip and guide other school districts that wish to serve those families who have served our country with courage and distinction.

Katina Stapleton is the program officer for the Systemic Approaches to Educating Highly Mobile Students research program.